Synopses & Reviews
The description for this book, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, will be forthcoming.
Review
"In its scale and scholarly care, Frank's study, even at this preliminary stage, has no rival throughout the extensive critical and biographical literature on Dostoevsky."--George Steiner, New Yorker
Review
"[A]nother impressive installment in one of modern scholarship's largest biographical achievements."--Kirkus Reviews
Review
[A]nother impressive installment in one of modern scholarship's largest biographical achievements. Kirkus Reviews
Review
In its scale and scholarly care, Frank's study, even at this preliminary stage, has no rival throughout the extensive critical and biographical literature on Dostoevsky. George Steiner
Synopsis
Volume two of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time
Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the Russian novelist in any language and one of the greatest literary biographies ever written. In this monumental work, Frank blends biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism to illuminate Dostoevsky's works and set them in their personal, historical, and ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.
This volume opens with the detention of the bookish young writer for membership in the radical Petrashevsky Circle and closes with his return to the capital ten years later as an ex-convict and former soldier who now proclaims himself an ardent supporter of the czar and the Russian imperial dynasty.